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Our goal is to help people share a passion for plants, to encourage excellence in horticulture and inspire all those with an interest in gardening. With the support of our members, we are helping two million school children with the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, supporting communities through RHS Britain in Bloom, encouraging people to grow their own food through our Grow Your Own campaign and running research projects and surveys.

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Name

Group

Type

Region

Song thrush - Turdus philomelos - Family: Turdidae

The song thrush is sometimes confused with the mistle thrush ; but it is smaller, more delicately spotted and lacks white in the tail. It is one of our best songsters, using short, melodic phrases, each repeated two or three times, a fact noted by many poets including Robert Browning. The second part of its 'Latin' (Greek in this case!) name, means 'loving song'. In many areas it is the dominant singing bird in late winter and early spring, and it continues to sing until late summer.

Numbers of song thrush have declined greatly during recent years, at least partly due to more intensive farming methods. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) has calculated this fall as 57% over the 31 years to 2001.The use of poisonous pellets to control slugs and snails may pose a threat to garden-dwelling thrushes. Try and find other means of controlling slugs (see the garden tips and the bibliography on this CD for suggestions) if you want these birds in your garden! Song thrushes also eat large numbers of earthworms and are most likely to be seen on lawns, often in the company of blackbirds, a close relative. This makes them especially vulnerable to domestic cats.

As well as gardens, song thrushes inhabit woodland, hedgerows, parks and scrub, preferring habitats where there is a mixture of open ground for foraging and dense vegetation for nesting. The cup-shaped nests are built from March onwards and constructed mainly from grasses, moss and roots. The mud lining separates the nest from the otherwise similar nest of the blackbird.